I’ve been pub­lished in peer-reviewed jour­nals that are freely acces­si­ble online before of course—such as the Eco­nom­ics E‑journal paper “Solv­ing the Para­dox of Mon­e­tary Prof­its”. I think Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis and Pol­i­cy does a bet­ter job of blend­ing the old paper-style jour­nal with the new, with a home page that emu­lates the cov­er of a paper jour­nal while pro­vid­ing hot links to the papers from that page.

Sad­ly, all the efforts of a gen­er­a­tion of Aus­tralian men and women have only made them more indebt­ed to the rest of the world. Aus­trali­a’s exter­nal net wealth is neg­a­tive, soon pass­ing minus $900b on an accel­er­at­ing down­ward tra­jec­to­ry. This ongo­ing dis­si­pa­tion of nation­al resources is unsus­tain­able. Aus­tralians live in a debt dream­time, one from which the rest of the world has been rude­ly awak­ened. After years of inad­e­quate poli­cies, the nation has a large exter­nal debt and sig­nif­i­cant gov­ern­ment expo­sures. Ser­vic­ing pres­sures are grow­ing as ris­ing uncer­tain­ties per­me­ate glob­al cred­it mar­kets. Reserve Bank poli­cies are wors­en­ing Aus­trali­a’s exter­nal posi­tion and need­less­ly dri­ving up inter­nal costs. Major pol­i­cy rethink­ing is war­rant­ed. Rel­e­vant issues are still lit­tle con­sid­ered, crowd­ed out of dia­logues by com­fort­ing myths that accom­pa­ny the Aus­tralian Debt Dream­time. Imbal­ances need prop­er recog­ni­tion with new approach­es and strate­gies devel­oped. Auto­mat­ic cor­rec­tions will not occur as his­to­ry and cur­rent over­seas expe­ri­ences demon­strate. A real awak­en­ing, improved posi­tion­ing and a touch of luck are required if Aus­tralians are to avoid being seri­ous­ly impov­er­ished by world events and their own con­fused Dream­ing.

This paper sum­maris­es the argu­ments I make at much greater length on macro­eco­nom­ics in the sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics. The one exten­sion to that argu­ment here is a more detailed dis­cus­sion of Hick­s’s IS-LM model–and in par­tic­u­lar, Hick­s’s admis­sion in 1981 that IS-LM was a pre-Key­ne­sian, neo­clas­si­cal mod­el dat­ing from 1934, which his 1936 “review” of the Gen­er­al The­o­ry false­ly passed off as a mod­el of Key­nes’s Gen­er­al The­o­ry.

Intro­duc­tion

The fail­ure of neo­clas­si­cal mod­els to warn of the eco­nom­ic cri­sis has led to some rare soul search­ing in a dis­ci­pline not known for such intro­spec­tion. The dom­i­nant reac­tion with­in the pro­fes­sion has been to admit the fail­ure, but to argue that there is no need for a dras­tic revi­sion of eco­nom­ic the­o­ry.

I reject this com­fort­able con­clu­sion, and argue instead that this cri­sis illus­trates the point made before­hand by Robert Solow, that mod­els in which macro­eco­nom­ic patholo­gies are impos­si­ble are not ade­quate mod­els of cap­i­tal­ism. Hick­s’s cri­tique of his own IS-LM mod­el also indi­cates that, though patholo­gies can be imposed on an IS-LM mod­el, it is also inap­pro­pri­ate for macro­eco­nom­ic analy­sis because of its false impo­si­tion of equi­lib­ri­um con­di­tions derived from Wal­ras’ Law. I then focus upon what I see as the key weak­ness in the neo­clas­si­cal approach to macro­eco­nom­ics which applies to both DSGE and IS-LM mod­els: the false assump­tion that the mon­ey sup­ply is exoge­nous. After out­lin­ing the alter­na­tive endoge­nous mon­ey per­spec­tive, I show that Wal­ras’ Law must be gen­er­al­ized for a cred­it econ­o­my to what I call the “Wal­ras-Schum­peter-Min­sky Law”. The empir­i­cal data strong­ly sup­ports this per­spec­tive, empha­siz­ing the need for a “root and branch” reform of macro­eco­nom­ics.

Defend­ing the inde­fen­si­ble

That mod­ern neo­clas­si­cal macro­eco­nom­ic mod­els failed to fore­warn of the eco­nom­ic cri­sis that began in 2007 is undis­put­ed. What is in dis­pute is the impli­ca­tions this should have for macro­eco­nom­ic the­o­ry.

Promi­nent mem­bers of the dis­ci­pline have argued that there should be no con­se­quences. Ben Bernanke (Bernanke 2010), recent Nobel Prize lau­re­ate Thomas Sar­gent (Rol­nick 2010) and the found­ing edi­tor of the AER: Macro Olivi­er Blan­chard (Blan­chard et al. 2010) have all assert­ed that neo­clas­si­cal mod­els helped guide pol­i­cy dur­ing the good times, and should not be aban­doned sim­ply because they did not see the bad times com­ing. Bernanke’s argu­ment is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of this per­spec­tive:

‘the recent finan­cial cri­sis was more a fail­ure of eco­nom­ic engi­neer­ing and eco­nom­ic man­age­ment than of what I have called eco­nom­ic sci­ence…

Do these fail­ures of stan­dard macro­eco­nom­ic mod­els mean that they are irrel­e­vant or at least sig­nif­i­cant­ly flawed? I think the answer is a qual­i­fied no. Eco­nom­ic mod­els are use­ful only in the con­text for which they are designed. Most of the time, includ­ing dur­ing reces­sions, seri­ous finan­cial insta­bil­i­ty is not an issue. The stan­dard mod­els were designed for these non-cri­sis peri­ods, and they have proven quite use­ful in that con­text. Notably, they were part of the intel­lec­tu­al frame­work that helped deliv­er low infla­tion and macro­eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty in most indus­tri­al coun­tries dur­ing the two decades that began in the mid-1980s.’ (Bernanke 2010, pp. 3, 17; empha­sis added)

I make no apol­o­gy for describ­ing this argu­ment as spe­cious, on at least two grounds.

First­ly, this argu­ment would only be tol­er­a­bly accept­able if neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics also had well-devel­oped mod­els that were suit­able for peri­ods of cri­sis, but it does not. Sec­ond­ly, this blasé accep­tance that there can be bad times sits odd­ly against the tri­umphal­ism that char­ac­ter­ized neo­clas­si­cal dis­course on macro­eco­nom­ics pri­or to this cri­sis. This is best exem­pli­fied by Lucas’s Pres­i­den­tial Address to the Amer­i­can Eco­nom­ic Asso­ci­a­tion in 2003, in which he assert­ed that neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics had suc­ceed­ed in elim­i­nat­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of extreme­ly bad times like those we are now expe­ri­enc­ing:

‘Macro­eco­nom­ics was born as a dis­tinct field in the 1940’s, as a part of the intel­lec­tu­al response to the Great Depres­sion. The term then referred to the body of knowl­edge and exper­tise that we hoped would pre­vent the recur­rence of that eco­nom­ic dis­as­ter. My the­sis in this lec­ture is that macro­eco­nom­ics in this orig­i­nal sense has suc­ceed­ed: Its cen­tral prob­lem of depres­sion pre­ven­tion has been solved, for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es, and has in fact been solved for many decades.’ (Lucas, Jr. 2003, p. 1 ; empha­sis added)

The propo­si­tion that there can be sep­a­rate mod­els for good and bad times also implies that there is no causal link between good and bad times, which would be true if they were sim­ply the prod­uct of exoge­nous shocks to the macro­econ­o­my. This is in fact how most neo­clas­si­cal mod­el­ers have react­ed: by ret­ro­spec­tive­ly treat­ing the cri­sis as being due, not mere­ly to unprece­dent­ed­ly large exoge­nous shocks, but shocks which var­ied in mag­ni­tude over time—while still remain­ing neg­a­tive rather than pos­i­tive:

‘the Great Reces­sion began in late 2007 and ear­ly 2008 with a series of adverse pref­er­ence and tech­nol­o­gy shocks in rough­ly the same mix and of rough­ly the same mag­ni­tude as those that hit the Unit­ed States at the onset of the pre­vi­ous two reces­sions…

The string of adverse pref­er­ence and tech­nol­o­gy shocks con­tin­ued, how­ev­er, through­out 2008 and into 2009. More­over, these shocks grew larg­er in mag­ni­tude, adding sub­stan­tial­ly not just to the length but also to the sever­i­ty of the great reces­sion…’ (Ire­land 2011, p. 48, see also McK­ib­bin and Stoeck­el 2009)

The fact that these shocks came from the finan­cial sector—which the ordi­nary pub­lic would tend to regard as being part of the econ­o­my, and there­fore to be more of an endoge­nous eco­nom­ic phe­nom­e­non than an exoge­nous event—has been treat­ed as large­ly irrel­e­vant by lead­ing neo­clas­si­cals:

‘The cri­sis has shown that large adverse shocks can and do hap­pen. In this cri­sis, they came from the finan­cial sec­tor, but they could come from else­where in the future—the effects of a pan­dem­ic on tourism and trade or the effects of a major ter­ror­ist attack on a large eco­nom­ic cen­ter.’ (Blan­chard, Del­l’Ar­ic­cia and Mau­ro 2010, p. 207)

Giv­en the sever­i­ty and per­sis­tence of this cri­sis, this is also spe­cious rea­son­ing: if the cri­sis was mere­ly due to a large exoge­nous neg­a­tive shock, sure­ly by now it would be over? Sure­ly too, since the “shocks” emanat­ed from the finance sec­tor, and the stan­dard neo­clas­si­cal doc­trine that per­mits a sep­a­ra­tion of eco­nom­ics from finance has now been empir­i­cal­ly reject­ed (Fama and French 2004), the treat­ment of dis­tur­bances in the finance sec­tor as “exoge­nous” to the econ­o­my should also be reject­ed?

These reac­tions of neo­clas­si­cal the­o­rists and mod­el­ers are there­fore no more than a plea that the core neo­clas­si­cal vision of the macro­econ­o­my as a sta­ble sys­tem sub­ject to exoge­nous shocks should be pre­served, despite an unprece­dent­ed empir­i­cal fail­ure. This propo­si­tion has been put open­ly by Blan­chard et al., amongst oth­ers:

How­ev­er, no less­er Neo­clas­si­cals than John Hicks (Hicks 1981) and Robert Solow (Solow 2003, 2001, 2008) have put the con­trary case that these babies— both today’s DSGE mod­els and the IS-LM mod­el that pre­ced­ed them—should nev­er have been con­ceived in the first place.

Hick­s’s dis­own­ing of IS-LM appears to have dis­ap­peared with­out trace in neo­clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture. Solow’s voice was at least acknowl­edged by Blan­chard when he pub­lished his excru­ci­at­ing­ly bad­ly timed sur­vey of mod­ern macro­eco­nom­ics (Blan­chard 2009, Blan­chard 2008), in which he stat­ed that:

‘after the explo­sion of the field in the 1970s, there has been enor­mous progress and sub­stan­tial con­ver­gence.„ large­ly because facts have a way of not going away, a large­ly shared vision both of fluc­tu­a­tions and of method­ol­o­gy has emerged… Not every­thing is fine… But none of this is dead­ly. The state of macro is good.’ (Blan­chard 2009, p. 210; empha­sis added).

In a foot­note, he added “Oth­ers, I know, dis­agree with this opti­mistic assess­ment (for exam­ple, Solow 2008)”, but he did not engage at all with Solow’s cri­tique. As the globe is now in its fifth year of unre­lent­ing eco­nom­ic tur­moil, it is time Solow was lis­tened to.

Solow’s cri­tique of DSGE

Solow became a crit­ic of neo­clas­si­cal macro­eco­nom­ics because he was sim­ply incred­u­lous that the growth mod­el he devel­oped could be even con­sid­ered as a basis for mod­el­ing the busi­ness cycle:

The puz­zle I want to discuss—at least it seems to me to be a puz­zle, though part of the puz­zle is why it does not seem to be a puz­zle to many of my younger colleagues—is this. More than forty years ago, I … worked out … neo­clas­si­cal growth the­o­ry… [I]t was clear from the begin­ning what I thought it did not apply to, name­ly short-run fluc­tu­a­tions in aggre­gate out­put and employ­ment … the busi­ness cycle…

[N]ow … if you pick up an arti­cle today with the words ‘busi­ness cycle’ in the title, there is a fair­ly high prob­a­bil­i­ty that its basic the­o­ret­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion will be what is called ‘real busi­ness cycle the­o­ry’ and the under­ly­ing mod­el will be … a slight­ly dressed up ver­sion of the neo­class­si­cal growth mod­el. The ques­tion I want to cir­cle around is: how did that hap­pen?’ (Solow 2001, pp. 23, 19)

Solow iden­ti­fied the search for micro­foun­da­tions for macro­eco­nom­ics as the foun­tain­head of DSGE mod­el­ing, and though he sur­mised that “The orig­i­nal impulse to look for bet­ter or more explic­it micro foun­da­tions was prob­a­bly rea­son­able” (Solow 2003, p. 1), he dis­missed the defense that micro­eco­nom­ics jus­ti­fied DSGE macro­eco­nom­ic mod­els as “a delu­sion”:

‘Sup­pose you want­ed to defend the use of the Ram­sey mod­el as the basis for a descrip­tive macro­eco­nom­ics. What could you say?… (I take it for grant­ed that “real­ism” is not an eli­gi­ble defense.)

You could claim that it is not pos­si­ble to do bet­ter at this lev­el of abstrac­tion; that there is no oth­er tractable way to meet the claims of eco­nom­ic the­o­ry. I think this claim is a delu­sion.

We know from the Son­nen­schein-Man­tel-Debreu the­o­rems that the only uni­ver­sal empir­i­cal aggrega­tive impli­ca­tions of gen­er­al equi­lib­ri­um the­o­ry are that excess demand func­tions should be con­tin­u­ous and homo­ge­neous of degree zero in prices, and should sat­is­fy Wal­ras’ Law. Any­one is free to impose fur­ther restric­tions on a macro mod­el, but they have to be jus­ti­fied for their own sweet sake, not as being required by the prin­ci­ples of eco­nom­ic the­o­ry.’ (Solow 2008, pp. 244)

Solow reject­ed both the “Salt­wa­ter” and “Fresh­wa­ter” approach­es to macro­eco­nom­ics. The base mod­el itself, the “Fresh­wa­ter” real busi­ness cycle mod­el, was unsuit­able for macro­eco­nom­ics because it ruled out the very behav­ior that macro­eco­nom­ics is sup­posed to explain:

‘The pre­ferred mod­el has a sin­gle rep­re­sen­ta­tive con­sumer opti­miz­ing over infi­nite time with per­fect fore­sight or ratio­nal expec­ta­tions, in an envi­ron­ment that real­izes the result­ing plans more or less flaw­less­ly through per­fect­ly com­pet­i­tive for­ward-look­ing mar­kets for goods and labor, and per­fect­ly flex­i­ble prices and wages.

How could any­one expect a sen­si­ble short-to-medi­um-run macro­eco­nom­ics to come out of that set-up?…

I start from the pre­sump­tion that we want macro­eco­nom­ics to account for the occa­sion­al aggrega­tive patholo­gies that beset mod­ern cap­i­tal­ist economies, like reces­sions, inter­vals of stag­na­tion, infla­tion, “stagfla­tion,” not to men­tion neg­a­tive patholo­gies like unusu­al­ly good times. A mod­el that rules out patholo­gies by def­i­n­i­tion is unlike­ly to help.’ (Solow 2003, p. 1; empha­sis added).

He dis­missed the “New Key­ne­sian” vari­ant that came to dom­i­nate the pro­fes­sion as no more than win­dow-dress­ing to improve the appar­ent fit of a bad mod­el to the data:

‘The sim­pler sort of RBC mod­el that I have been using for expos­i­to­ry pur­pos­es has had lit­tle or no empir­i­cal suc­cess, even with a very unde­mand­ing notion of ’empir­i­cal suc­cess’. As a result, some of the freer spir­its in the RBC school have begun to loosen up the basic frame­work by allow­ing for ‘imper­fec­tions’ in the labor mar­ket, and even in the cap­i­tal mar­ket…

The mod­el then sounds bet­ter and fits the data bet­ter. This is not sur­pris­ing: these imper­fec­tions were cho­sen by intel­li­gent econ­o­mists to make the mod­els work bet­ter...’ (Solow 2001, p. 26; empha­sis added)

One need not won­der how Solow would react to neo­clas­si­cal macro­econ­o­mists, after the cri­sis, adding not mere­ly imper­fec­tions but adjustable exoge­nous shocks to improve the mod­el’s fit to data that “imper­fec­tions” alone can­not explain, since he gave his opin­ion before­hand:

‘It is always pos­si­ble to claim that those “patholo­gies” are delu­sions, and the econ­o­my is mere­ly adjust­ing opti­mal­ly to some exoge­nous shock. But why should rea­son­able peo­ple accept this?’ (Solow, 2003, p. 1; empha­sis added)

Though Solow saw the des­ti­na­tion that neo­clas­si­cal macro­eco­nom­ics had reached as an impasse, he pro­vid­ed no alter­nate route for­ward. Some hark for a rever­sal of direc­tion back to IS-LM mod­els (Man­fred Gärt­ner and Flo­ri­an Jung, 2010), in which patholo­gies at least appear fea­si­ble. How­ev­er that route was blocked three decades ago by one John Hicks.

Hick­s’s Cri­tique of IS-LM

In 1981, John Hicks admit­ted that, though regard­ed as a mod­el of Keynes, IS-LM is neo­clas­si­cal mod­el that pre­dates Key­nes’s Gen­er­al The­o­ry (J. M. Keynes, 1936). Hicks not­ed that though he first spelled out the IS-LM mod­el in detail in “Mr. Keynes and the Clas­sics” (J. R. Hicks, 1937, his review of The Gen­er­al The­o­ry), the mod­el was first devel­oped in a less well-known paper, “Wages and Inter­est: The Dynam­ic Prob­lem” (J. R. Hicks, 1935). Hicks was adamant that this paper, and not “Mr. Keynes and the Classics”—let alone The Gen­er­al The­o­ry itself—was the real foun­da­tion of the IS-LM mod­el:

‘The oth­er, much less well known, is even more rel­e­vant. “Wages and Inter­est: the Dynam­ic Prob­lem” was a first sketch of what was to become the “dynam­ic” mod­el of Val­ue and Cap­i­tal (1939). It is impor­tant here, because it shows (I think quite con­clu­sive­ly) that that mod­el was already in my mind before I wrote even the first of my papers on Keynes.’ (Hicks 1981, p. 140; empha­sis added)

Of course, that IS-LM is in fact a Neo­clas­si­cal mod­el and not a Key­ne­sian one is no rea­son per se to dis­miss it: it could still be an ade­quate mod­el of the macro econ­o­my. But Hicks argued that on its own mer­its, it failed.

The mod­el in “Wages and Inter­est” had an ultra-short-run of a week in a “bread econ­o­my” in which prices were decid­ed on a Mon­day and then applied for the remain­der of the week. But IS-LM, which Hicks described as “a trans­la­tion of Keynes’ non­flex­price mod­el into my terms”, was a ““short-peri­od,” … we shall not go far wrong if we think of it as a year” (John Hicks, 1981, p. 141). In Hick­s’s mod­el, events dur­ing the week were not allowed to affect anything—a device which Hicks described as “a very arti­fi­cial device, not (I would think now) much to be rec­om­mend­ed”, but which let him treat expec­ta­tions as con­stant. There­fore, equi­lib­ri­um applied:

‘That is to say (it is equiv­a­lent to say­ing), we may fair­ly reck­on that these mar­kets, with respect to these data, are in equi­lib­ri­um.’ (Hicks 1981, p. 146)

How­ev­er, this arti­fice could not be extend­ed to a year, and used to derive an LM curve since:

‘for the pur­pose of gen­er­at­ing an LM curve, which is to rep­re­sent liq­uid­i­ty pref­er­ence, it will not do with­out amend­ment. For there is no sense in liq­uid­i­ty, unless expec­ta­tions are uncer­tain.’ (Hicks 1981, p. 152; empha­sis added)

This in turn meant that mar­kets had to be in disequilibrium—but IS-LM itself was derived from equi­lib­ri­um analy­sis, as Hicks also explained:

‘the idea of the IS-LM dia­gram came to me as a result of the work I had been doing on three-way exchange, con­ceived in a Wal­rasian man­ner. I had already found a way of rep­re­sent­ing three-way exchange on a two-dimen­sion­al dia­gram (to appear in due course in chap­ter 5 of Val­ue and Cap­i­tal). As it appears there, it is a piece of sta­t­ics; but it was essen­tial to my approach (as already appears in “Wages and Inter­est: the Dynam­ic Prob­lem”) that sta­t­ic analy­sis of this sort could be car­ried over to “dynam­ics” by rede­f­i­n­i­tion of terms. So it was nat­ur­al for me to think that a sim­i­lar device could be used for the Keynes the­o­ry.’ (Hicks 1981, p. 141–142)

But in fact, extend­ing an equi­lib­ri­um mod­el with a time­frame of a week to a time­frame of a year in which liq­uid­i­ty pref­er­ence played a key role led to a hope­less mud­dle which Hicks, with hind­sight, could now appre­ci­ate. His final judg­ment on his own mod­el was scathing:

‘I accord­ing­ly con­clude that the only way in which IS-LM analy­sis use­ful­ly survives—as any­thing more than a class­room gad­get, to be super­seded, lat­er on, by some­thing better—is in appli­ca­tion to a par­tic­u­lar kind of causal analy­sis, where the use of equi­lib­ri­um meth­ods, even a dras­tic use of equi­lib­ri­um meth­ods, is not inap­pro­pri­ate…

When one turns to ques­tions of pol­i­cy … the use of equi­lib­ri­um meth­ods is still more sus­pect. … There can be no change of pol­i­cy if every­thing is to go on as expected—if the econ­o­my is to remain in what (how­ev­er approx­i­mate­ly) may be regard­ed as its exist­ing equi­lib­ri­um. It may be hoped that, after the change in pol­i­cy, the econ­o­my will some­how, at some time in the future, set­tle into what may be regard­ed, in the same sense, as a new equi­lib­ri­um; but there must nec­es­sar­i­ly be a stage before that equi­lib­ri­um is reached. There must always be a prob­lem of tra­verse. For the study of a tra­verse, one has to have recourse to sequen­tial meth­ods of one kind or anoth­er.’ (Hicks 1981, p. 152–153)

Hick­s’s fun­da­men­tal con­clu­sion there­fore is that macro­eco­nom­ic analy­sis must assume dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um rather than equilibrium—and this does even more dam­age to IS-LM than Hicks him­self appre­ci­at­ed. To reduce macro­eco­nom­ics to the inter­play of sim­ply the goods and mon­ey mar­ket, Hicks had used the Wal­rasian assump­tion that, if n‑1 mar­kets are in equi­lib­ri­um, then the nth mar­ket must also be in equi­lib­ri­um, so that he could ignore the mar­ket for loan­able funds:

‘One did not have to both­er about the mar­ket for “loan­able funds,” since it appeared, on the Wal­ras anal­o­gy, that if these two “mar­kets” were in equi­lib­ri­um, the third must be also. So I con­clud­ed that the inter­sec­tion of IS and LM deter­mined the equi­lib­ri­um of the sys­tem as a whole.’ (Hicks 1981, p. 142)

But this Wal­rasian log­ic cuts both ways: if dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um applies in one mar­ket, then at least one other—and prob­a­bly all others—must also be in dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um. There­fore, as soon as dis­e­qui­l­bri­um is acknowl­edged, mar­kets whose very exis­tence has been ignored in equi­lib­ri­um analysis—such as, obvi­ous­ly in IS-LM, the labor market—can no longer be ignored. Their dis­e­qui­l­bri­um dynam­ics must now be con­sid­ered, and the IS-LM mod­el can give no guid­ance as to how they will behave.

An alter­na­tive macro­eco­nom­ics

Solow’s key obser­va­tion is that macro­eco­nom­ics should seek to “account for the occa­sion­al aggrega­tive patholo­gies that beset mod­ern cap­i­tal­ist economies”. Hick­s’s key con­tri­bu­tion was that macro­eco­nom­ics must be a study of dis­e­qui­l­bri­um dynamics—a point made decades ear­li­er still by Irv­ing Fish­er when he penned “The Debt-Defla­tion The­o­ry of Great Depres­sions”:

‘We may ten­ta­tive­ly assume that, ordi­nar­i­ly and with­in wide lim­its, all, or almost all, eco­nom­ic vari­ables tend, in a gen­er­al way, toward a sta­ble equi­lib­ri­um… But … New dis­tur­bances are, human­ly speak­ing, sure to occur, so that, in actu­al fact, any vari­able is almost always above or below the ide­al equi­lib­ri­um…

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly there may be—in fact, at most times there must be—over-or under-pro­duc­tion, over- or under-con­sump­tion, over- or under-spend­ing, over- or under-sav­ing, over- or under-invest­ment, and over or under every­thing else. It is as absurd to assume that, for any long peri­od of time, the vari­ables in the eco­nom­ic orga­ni­za­tion, or any part of them, will “stay put,” in per­fect equi­lib­ri­um, as to assume that the Atlantic Ocean can ever be with­out a wave.’ (Fish­er 1933, p. 339; empha­sis added)

These prin­ci­ples point in the direc­tion first indi­cat­ed by Hyman Min­sky, that since cap­i­tal­ist economies have expe­ri­enced Depres­sions in the past, to ade­quate­ly mod­el cap­i­tal­ism:

‘it is nec­es­sary to have an eco­nom­ic the­o­ry which makes great depres­sions one of the pos­si­ble states in which our type of cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my can find itself.’ (Min­sky 1982 , p. 5)

Min­sky’s alter­na­tive was the “Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis”, and it was based on an explic­it rejec­tion of the neo­clas­si­cal par­a­digm:

‘The abstract mod­el of the neo­clas­si­cal syn­the­sis can­not gen­er­ate insta­bil­i­ty. When the neo­clas­si­cal syn­the­sis is con­struct­ed, cap­i­tal assets, financ­ing arrange­ments that cen­ter around banks and mon­ey cre­ation, con­straints imposed by lia­bil­i­ties, and the prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with knowl­edge about uncer­tain futures are all assumed away. For econ­o­mists and pol­i­cy-mak­ers to do bet­ter we have to aban­don the neo­clas­si­cal syn­the­sis.’ (Min­sky 1982 , p. 5)

I have devel­oped math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els of this hypoth­e­sis (Steve Keen, 1995, 2008, 2011b, 2000) which are based on a con­sid­ered rejec­tion of vir­tu­al­ly every pre­cept of neo­clas­si­cal the­o­ry. Explain­ing all these method­olog­i­cal deci­sions requires a book rather than a jour­nal paper (Steve Keen, 2011a), so here I will con­cen­trate on what expe­ri­ence has con­vinced me is the key rea­son why neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists failed to fore­see the cri­sis, and why to this day they can­not under­stand why it remains so intractable. This is their vision of how mon­ey is cre­at­ed.

Endoge­nous Mon­ey, Eco­nom­ic Growth and Dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um

Non-econ­o­mists might expect that eco­nom­ic mod­els of how mon­ey is cre­at­ed would be based on empir­i­cal research. There is such a mod­el, but it is the province of the non-neo­clas­si­cal school of thought known as Post Key­ne­sian eco­nom­ics. Neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists have instead per­sist­ed with the “frac­tion­al reserve banking/money mul­ti­pli­er” mod­el, which argues that banks need excess reserves before they can lend, that these are cre­at­ed ini­tial­ly by an expan­sion of gov­ern­ment-cre­at­ed “fiat” mon­ey, and that a sequence of bank deposits by recip­i­ents of fiat mon­ey, and loans of all but a frac­tion of this deposit by banks, cre­ates cred­it mon­ey that is a mul­ti­ple of the ini­tial injec­tion of fiat mon­ey.

This is in turn mar­ried to a vision of banks as mere inter­me­di­aries, so that they can be for­mal­ly ignored in macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el­ing. Final­ly, the lev­el of pri­vate debt is also ignored in neo­clas­si­cal macro­eco­nom­ics, since a loan is regard­ed as sim­ply a trans­fer of spend­ing pow­er from a saver to a bor­row­er. With one per­son­’s spend­ing pow­er going down and anoth­er’s going up by the same amount, only the dis­tri­b­u­tion of debt could matter—not its aggre­gate lev­el. As Bernanke explained, this is why Fish­er’s “Debt Defla­tion” expla­na­tion of the Great Depres­sion was ignored by neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists:

‘Fish­er’s idea was less influ­en­tial in aca­d­e­m­ic cir­cles, though, because of the coun­ter­ar­gu­ment that debt-defla­tion rep­re­sent­ed no more than a redis­tri­b­u­tion from one group (debtors) to anoth­er (cred­i­tors). Absent implau­si­bly large dif­fer­ences in mar­gin­al spend­ing propen­si­ties among the groups, it was sug­gest­ed, pure redis­tri­b­u­tions should have no sig­nif­i­cant macro-eco­nom­ic effects…’ (Bernanke 2000, p. 24)

Over forty years ago, the then Senior Vice-Pres­i­dent of the New York Fed­er­al Reserve, Alan Holmes, point­ed out that this per­spec­tive in which the aggre­gate lev­el of debt does not mat­ter, and banks are mere inter­me­di­aries between savers and lenders, was erro­neous. He argued that the view “that the bank­ing sys­tem only expands loans after the [Fed­er­al Reserve] Sys­tem (or mar­ket fac­tors) have put reserves in the bank­ing sys­tem” was based on “a naive assump­tion”. Instead, he argued,

‘In the real world, banks extend cred­it, cre­at­ing deposits in the process, and look for the reserves lat­er. The ques­tion then becomes one of whether and how the Fed­er­al Reserve will accom­mo­date the demand for reserves. In the very short run, the Fed­er­al Reserve has lit­tle or no choice about accom­mo­dat­ing that demand; over time, its influ­ence can obvi­ous­ly be felt.’ (Holmes 1969, p. 73; empha­sis added)

Holmes was thus argu­ing that banks do not need deposits in order to lend—that in fact the act of lend­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cre­ates a match­ing deposit—and that banks can there­fore endoge­nous­ly cre­ate new spend­ing pow­er (new deposits) by issu­ing a loan, with­out there­by reduc­ing the spend­ing pow­er of savers.

This expe­ri­ence-based judg­ment was sub­se­quent­ly con­firmed by empir­i­cal research by the Post Key­ne­sian econ­o­mist Basil Moore (Basil J. Moore, 1979, 1988, 2001, 1983), and even by the founders of Real Busi­ness Cycle the­o­ry (Finn E. Kyd­land and Edward C. Prescott, 1990). This led to the devel­op­ment of the mod­el of “endoge­nous mon­ey”, in which a loan is regard­ed not a trans­fer of spend­ing pow­er from a saver to a lender, but a cre­ation of spend­ing pow­er for the bor­row­er by the bank ab ini­tio. This mod­ern Post Key­ne­sian the­o­ry in fact redis­cov­ered an argu­ment first put by Schum­peter, that banks cre­ate mon­ey sim­ply by an account­ing oper­a­tion: a loan extend­ed to a bor­row­er cre­ates both debt and spend­ing pow­er “out of noth­ing”:

‘It is always a ques­tion, not of trans­form­ing pur­chas­ing pow­er which already exists in some­one’s pos­ses­sion, but of the cre­ation of new pur­chas­ing pow­er out of noth­ing…’ (Schum­peter 1934, p. 73)

This means that the increase in debt actu­al­ly adds to aggre­gate demand, so that total spend­ing is the sum of both incomes gen­er­at­ed in “the cir­cu­lar flow” —which pri­mar­i­ly finances consumption—plus the growth in debt—which pri­mar­i­ly finances invest­ment. Since this con­cept is so for­eign to neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists, it is worth cit­ing Schum­peter at length on it here:

‘the entrepreneur—in prin­ci­ple and as a rule—does need cred­it, in the sense of a tem­po­rary trans­fer to him of pur­chas­ing pow­er, in order to pro­duce at all, to be able to car­ry out his new com­bi­na­tions, to become an entre­pre­neur. And this pur­chas­ing pow­er does not flow towards him auto­mat­i­cal­ly, as to the pro­duc­er in the cir­cu­lar flow, by the sale of what he pro­duced in pre­ced­ing peri­ods. If he does not hap­pen to pos­sess it … he must bor­row it… He can only become an entre­pre­neur by pre­vi­ous­ly becom­ing a debtor… his becom­ing a debtor aris­es from the neces­si­ty of the case and is not some­thing abnor­mal, an acci­den­tal event to be explained by par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances. What he first wants is cred­it. Before he requires any goods what­ev­er, he requires pur­chas­ing pow­er. He is the typ­i­cal debtor in cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety.’ (see also Big­gs and May­er 2010, Big­gs et al. 2010, Schum­peter 1934, p. 102)

Schum­peter does not deny that some invest­ment is financed by a trans­fer of exist­ing funds from savers—hence result­ing in a fall in spend­ing by saver-con­sumers and an off­set­ting increase in spend­ing by bor­row­er-investors, with no over­all macro­eco­nom­ic impli­ca­tions. But he insists that the pri­ma­ry source of investor spend­ing comes from the endoge­nous expan­sion of the mon­ey sup­ply, which gives spend­ing pow­er to entre­pre­neurs with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the exist­ing spend­ing pow­er of savers, so that ris­ing debt does have macro­eco­nom­ic effects:

‘Even though the con­ven­tion­al answer to our ques­tion is not obvi­ous­ly absurd, yet there is anoth­er method of obtain­ing mon­ey for this pur­pose, which … does not pre­sup­pose the exis­tence of accu­mu­lat­ed results of pre­vi­ous devel­op­ment, and hence may be con­sid­ered as the only one which is avail­able in strict log­ic. This method of obtain­ing mon­ey is the cre­ation of pur­chas­ing pow­er by banks…’ (Schum­peter 1934, p. 73)

This leads Schum­peter to what he hap­pi­ly describes as a “heresy… that process­es in terms of means of pay­ment are not mere­ly reflex­es of process­es in terms of goods” (Joseph Alois Schum­peter, 1934, p. 95). Instead, in a grow­ing cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my, aggre­gate demand is the sum of demand from the sale of goods and ser­vices plus demand from the growth in cred­it-mon­ey, where the lat­ter is the pri­ma­ry source of invest­ment. Fama and French con­firmed this hypoth­e­sized rela­tion­ship between change in debt and invest­ment in an empir­i­cal study:

‘These cor­re­la­tions con­firm the impres­sion that debt plays a key role in accom­mo­dat­ing year-by-year vari­a­tion in invest­ment.’ (Fama and French 1999, p. 1954)

This com­bi­na­tion of the endoge­nous expan­sion of spend­ing pow­er by bank lend­ing, plus the use of that by entre­pre­neurs to finance invest­ment, means that the change in the lev­el of pri­vate debt does have macro­eco­nom­ic significance—and it plays a cen­tral role in Schum­peter’s the­o­ry of the busi­ness cycle. How­ev­er it is not the end of the mat­ter, because entre­pre­neurs are not the only ones who bor­row mon­ey: so do key actors in Min­sky’s expla­na­tion for Great Depres­sions, “Ponzi Financiers”.

These bor­row­ers do not pri­mar­i­ly invest with bor­rowed mon­ey, but buy exist­ing assets, and hope to prof­it by sell­ing those assets on a ris­ing mar­ket. Unlike Schum­peter’s entre­pre­neurs, whose debts today can be repaid from prof­its tomor­row, Ponzi Financiers always have debt ser­vic­ing costs than exceed the cash flows from the assets they pur­chase with bor­rowed mon­ey. They there­fore must expand their debts or sell assets to con­tin­ue func­tion­ing:

A Ponzi finance unit is a spec­u­la­tive financ­ing unit for which the income com­po­nent of the near term cash flows falls short of the near term inter­est pay­ments on debt so that for some time in the future the out­stand­ing debt will grow due to inter­est on exist­ing debt… Ponzi units can ful­fill their pay­ment com­mit­ments on debts only by bor­row­ing (or dis­pos­ing of assets)… a Ponzi unit must increase its out­stand­ing debts.’ (Min­sky 1982, p. 24)

There­fore in a cred­it-based econ­o­my, there are three sources of aggre­gate demand, and three ways in which this demand is expend­ed:

Demand from income earned by sell­ing goods and ser­vices, which pri­mar­i­ly finances con­sump­tion;

Demand from ris­ing entre­pre­neur­ial debt, which pri­mar­i­ly finances invest­ment; and

Demand from ris­ing Ponzi debt, which pri­mar­i­ly finances the pur­chase of exist­ing assets.

Schum­peter’s and Min­sky’s per­spec­tives thus enable us to inte­grate cred­it, asset mar­kets and dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um analy­sis into an alter­na­tive macro­eco­nom­ics. In a cred­it econ­o­my, aggre­gate demand is the sum of income plus the change in debt, and this demand is expend­ed on both goods and ser­vices and pur­chas­es of exist­ing assets. Debt there­fore has both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions for the econ­o­my: it finances the expan­sion of eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty via inno­va­tion and invest­ment, but it can also cause asset bub­bles and even­tu­al­ly, an eco­nom­ic cri­sis if too much of this debt is direct­ed to Ponzi Finance. This is pre­cise­ly what occurred in the last two decades.

Com­par­ing Endoge­nous Mon­ey to “the Mon­ey Mul­ti­pli­er”

As is well known, Bernanke blamed the Fed for caus­ing the Great Depres­sion:

‘there is now over­whelm­ing evi­dence that the main fac­tor depress­ing aggre­gate demand was a world­wide con­trac­tion in world mon­ey sup­plies. This mon­e­tary col­lapse was itself the result of a poor­ly man­aged and tech­ni­cal­ly flawed inter­na­tion­al mon­e­tary sys­tem (the gold stan­dard, as recon­sti­tut­ed after World War I).’ (Bernanke 2000, p. ix)

The mon­ey mul­ti­pli­er the­o­ry of mon­ey cre­ation played a large role in his argu­ment that the Great Depres­sion was trig­gered by the Fed­er­al Reserve’s reduc­tion of the US base mon­ey sup­ply between June 1928 and June 1931:

‘the Unit­ed States is the only coun­try in which the dis­cre­tionary com­po­nent of pol­i­cy was arguably sig­nif­i­cant­ly desta­bi­liz­ing… the ratio of mon­e­tary base to inter­na­tion­al reserves … fell con­sis­tent­ly in the Unit­ed States from … 1928:II … through the sec­ond quar­ter of 1931. As a result, U.S. nom­i­nal mon­ey growth was pre­cise­ly zero between 1928:IV and 1929:IV, despite both gold inflows and an increase in the mon­ey mul­ti­pli­er.

The year 1930 was even worse in this respect: between 1929:IV and 1930:IV, nom­i­nal mon­ey in the Unit­ed States fell by almost 6 [per­cent]… The prox­i­mate cause of this decline in M1 was con­tin­ued con­trac­tion in the ratio of base to reserves, which rein­forced rather than off­set declines in the mon­ey mul­ti­pli­er. This tight­en­ing … locates much of the blame for the ear­ly (pre-1931) slow­down in world mon­e­tary aggre­gates with the Fed­er­al Reserve.’ (Ben S. Bernanke, 2000, p. 153)

Bernanke’s sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence focused on the rela­tion­ship between change in M1 and the lev­el of unem­ploy­ment. Using a longer and more detailed series for M1 than Bernanke used (Fried­man and Schwartz 1963, Table A1), there is indeed a robust neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion between change in M1 and unem­ploy­ment (see Fig­ure 1; unem­ploy­ment is invert­ed on the right hand axis to show the neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion more clear­ly). The R2 is ‑0.33 for the whole peri­od, ‑0.31 for 1920–1930 and a strong ‑0.67 for 1930–1940.

Fig­ure 1: Change in M1 and Unem­ploy­ment, 1920–1940

How­ev­er M1 includes mon­ey cre­at­ed by the banks, and blam­ing the Fed­er­al Reserve for its col­lapse in the 1930s takes the mon­ey mul­ti­pli­er for grant­ed as a valid expla­na­tion of mon­ey creation—which the endoge­nous mon­ey approach dis­putes. Only M0 or Base Mon­ey is strict­ly under the Fed’s con­trol, and (using the St Louis FREDAMBSL data), the rela­tion­ship between unem­ploy­ment and that part of the mon­ey sup­ply over which the Fed has undis­put­ed con­trol is very dif­fer­ent (see Fig­ure 2). The cor­re­la­tion for the whole time peri­od now has the wrong sign (+0.44); more­over there is a break in the rela­tion­ship. In the peri­od 1920–1930, the cor­re­la­tion is small with the cor­rect sign (-0.22); in the peri­od 1930–1940, it is small with the wrong sign (+0.28).

Fig­ure 2: Change in Base Mon­ey and Unem­ploy­ment, 1920–1940

There is also a break in the rela­tion­ship between changes in M0 and changes in M1. In the 1920s, the cor­re­la­tion was strong and pos­i­tive (+0.89)—in line with the “mon­ey mul­ti­pli­er” argu­ment. But in the 1930s, while still pos­i­tive it was much weak­er (+0.34). From the data too, it is obvi­ous that the 1930s Fed was try­ing to boost the mon­ey sup­ply from 1931 till 1937. It then reduced its stim­u­lus in 1937 when it false­ly believed that the cri­sis was over as unem­ploy­ment began to fall, only to see it start to rise once again from 11 back to 20 per­cent. Shocked, it rapid­ly reversed direc­tion, increas­ing base mon­ey by more than 20 per­cent per annum from mid-1938 on. Arguably the direc­tion of cau­sa­tion was not that changes in M0 and M1 dri­ve unem­ploy­ment, but that changes in unem­ploy­ment dri­ve Fed­er­al Reserve pol­i­cy and hence changes in M0—but with lit­tle impact on the over­all growth of the mon­ey sup­ply and hence lit­tle impact upon eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty.

Clear­ly the “The Fed Did It” argu­ment is on shaky grounds with respect to the Great Depres­sion, and as Bernanke is now find­ing out the hard way, it is an even more sus­pect argu­ment today. First­ly the rela­tion­ship of growth in M3 to unem­ploy­ment is even stronger than the M1 to unem­ploy­ment rela­tion from 1920–1940: the R2 is ‑0.7 for the whole peri­od.

How­ev­er the M0 to unem­ploy­ment cor­re­la­tion has the wrong sign, and is even stronger than the wrong cor­re­la­tion for the 1930s at +0.51 (see Fig­ure 4). The biggest boost to Base Mon­ey in record­ed his­to­ry did lit­tle to avert the col­lapse into the Great Reces­sion, and repeat­ed boosts are doing very lit­tle to end it.

Fig­ure 4: The Cor­re­la­tion of M0 Change and Unem­ploy­ment has the “Wrong” Sign

The “Mon­ey Mul­ti­pli­er” also has even less effect on the mon­ey sup­ply itself now than back in the Great Depres­sion: the cor­re­la­tion between changes in M0 and changes in M3 is effec­tive­ly zero for the whole peri­od since 1990 (-0.07), strong­ly of the wrong sign for the pre-cri­sis peri­od from 1990–2008 (-0.55), and only bare­ly pos­i­tive for the post-cri­sis peri­od (+0.14).

Fig­ure 5: Change in M0 has no Cor­re­la­tion with Change in M3

In con­trast, the endoge­nous mon­ey analy­sis of both the Great Depres­sion and the “Great Con­trac­tion” (http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff83/English) is sub­stan­tial­ly more robust. To test the endoge­nous mon­ey expla­na­tion, I put the propo­si­tion that aggre­gate demand is the sum of income plus the change in debt, and that this is expend­ed on both goods and ser­vices and pur­chas­es of exist­ing assets, in an equa­tion where the left hand side rep­re­sents mon­e­tary flows and the right hand side rep­re­sents the mon­e­tary val­ue of phys­i­cal sup­plies and turnover of finan­cial claims on phys­i­cal assets:

NAT stands for “Net Asset Turnover”, which can be fac­tored into the price index for assets PA, times their quan­ti­ty QA, times the turnover TA expressed as a frac­tion of the num­ber of assets

The endoge­nous mon­ey hypoth­e­sis thus asserts that there is a rela­tion­ship between the change in debt and the lev­el of both eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty (GDP) and activ­i­ty on asset mar­kets. Since the strength of this rela­tion­ship vis-a-vis the impact of income on eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty and asset mar­kets depends on the size of the change in debt rela­tion to the lev­el of income, in the fol­low­ing cor­re­la­tions I con­sid­er change in debt rel­a­tive to GDP rather than change in debt per se.

The cor­re­la­tion between change in debt and unem­ploy­ment is far stronger than the cor­re­la­tion between change in M1 and unem­ploy­ment dur­ing both peri­ods:

The data strong­ly sup­port the endoge­nous mon­ey propo­si­tion that the accel­er­a­tion of debt has macro­eco­nom­ic sig­nif­i­cance. The cor­re­la­tion between cred­it accel­er­a­tion and change in unem­ploy­ment in the 1920–40 peri­od is sig­nif­i­cant and has the cor­rect sign.

Fig­ure 8: Debt Accel­er­a­tion and Unem­ploy­ment Change, 1920–1940

The cor­re­la­tion for the peri­od 1990-Now is stronger still (-0.75) and in fact is larg­er than the cor­re­la­tion of change in M3 with the lev­el of unemployment—let alone its rate of change.

Fig­ure 9: Debt Accel­er­a­tion and Unem­ploy­ment Change, 1990–2012

The cor­re­la­tion of the accel­er­a­tion of debt with change in asset prices is also sub­stan­tial. In strong con­trast to the now dis­cred­it­ed Effi­cient Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis claim that debt plays no role in deter­min­ing the val­ue of even a sin­gle cor­po­ra­tion, the accel­er­a­tion of debt has a sub­stan­tial influ­ence upon the change in val­u­a­tion of the entire asset mar­ket.

Fig­ure 10: Cred­it Accel­er­a­tion & the DJIA, 1922–1940

Fig­ure 11: Cred­it Accel­er­a­tion and the DJIA, 1990-Now

This is espe­cial­ly marked in the case of hous­ing, when the accel­er­a­tion of mort­gage debt can be iso­lat­ed. The cor­re­la­tion of the accel­er­a­tion of mort­gage debt with the change in real house prices is 0.8.

Fig­ure 12: Mort­gage Accel­er­a­tion and Change in Real House Prices

Since debt can­not accel­er­ate indef­i­nite­ly, this is also why asset bub­bles, ulti­mate­ly, have to crash—and there­fore also a rea­son why macro­eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy should attempt to pre­vent them in the first place.

Con­clu­sion: towards a new macro­eco­nom­ics

The analy­sis here is still only pre­lim­i­nary, but the data gives far stronger empir­i­cal sup­port to the endoge­nous mon­ey, cred­it-dri­ven per­spec­tive than to the neo­clas­si­cal. For both the­o­ret­i­cal and empir­i­cal rea­sons, Neo­clas­si­cal macro­eco­nom­ics does indeed deserve to be “thrown out with the bath­wa­ter”, and a new dynam­ic, dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um macro­eco­nom­ics con­struct­ed in its stead.

Fail­ure to hon­est­ly con­front the the­o­ret­i­cal weak­ness­es and empir­i­cal fail­ures of the dom­i­nant school of eco­nom­ics will not pre­serve it. Indeed, con­tin­u­ing to ignore the gulf between the pre­dic­tions of neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ic mod­els and the state of the econ­o­my will sim­ply accel­er­ate the steep decline in the pub­lic respect accord­ed to econ­o­mists since this cri­sis began. Ulti­mate­ly, com­pla­cen­cy and denial will lead eco­nom­ics back to the posi­tion of dis­dain that Keynes described so well dur­ing the last Depres­sion:

But although the doc­trine itself has remained unques­tioned by ortho­dox econ­o­mists up to a late date, its sig­nal fail­ure for pur­pos­es of sci­en­tif­ic pre­dic­tion has great­ly impaired, in the course of time, the pres­tige of its prac­ti­tion­ers. For pro­fes­sion­al econ­o­mists, after Malthus, were appar­ent­ly unmoved by the lack of cor­re­spon­dence between the results of their the­o­ry and the facts of obser­va­tion; a dis­crep­an­cy which the ordi­nary man has not failed to observe, with the result of his grow­ing unwill­ing­ness to accord to econ­o­mists that mea­sure of respect which he gives to oth­er groups of sci­en­tists whose the­o­ret­i­cal results are con­firmed by obser­va­tion when they are applied to the facts. (J. M. Keynes, 1936, p. 33)

References

Bernanke, B. (2010). On the Impli­ca­tions of the Finan­cial Cri­sis for Eco­nom­ics. Con­fer­ence Co-spon­sored by the Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Stud­ies and the Bend­heim Cen­ter for Finance, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. Prince­ton, NJ: US Fed­er­al Reserve.

Bernanke, B.S., M. Gertler and S. Gilchrist (1996). The Finan­cial Accel­er­a­tor and the Flight to Qual­i­ty, Review of Eco­nom­ics and Sta­tis­tics. 78: 1–15.

About Steve Keen

I am Professor of Economics and Head of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University London, and a long time critic of conventional economic thought. As well as attacking mainstream thought in Debunking Economics, I am also developing an alternative dynamic approach to economic modelling. The key issue I am tackling here is the prospect for a debt-deflation on the back of the enormous private debts accumulated globally, and our very low rate of inflation.

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